Has anyone tried Paula Deene's recipes? Are they any good?

[nolabear]

3. Yes, some are very good. I grew up on versions of some of them. But many are upscale poverty food.

Paula Deen is her own animal, a woman who found a way to become a character, as did Martha Stewart and Rachel Ray and Gordon Ramsey and a lot of others. She's paying for some dreadful roots and I hope she sincerely learns and finds a way to do good.

But the food...I grew up with this food. My grandmother ran a little cafe in Mississippi and I know fried chicken and banana pudding and grits and butter and gravy and on and on. Lots of it came from having little money, so cheap, fatty meats and offal went into the meals. Pigs' feet, chit'lins, head cheese, liver and lights (lungs), pork because pigs eat anything and could be fed wild and cows need care and the proper diet. Biscuits and gravy? Flour, water, and lard, and that's about it. Greens? My granddaddy picked poke salet off the side of the road and we put bacon grease in collards and turnip greens and salted hell out of it, and it was good. And kept people from having the rickets that the rest of the diet would have given them. And since we are predisposed to seek out that kind of thing, great in survival culture but awful in culture of plenty, it tastes wonderful (except for that offal stuff which I gag at). Paula has taken great advantage of that, but didn't manage to convey that these days you'd better save it for special or it will kill you. It killed people then, but slowly as opposed to the fast death of starvation.